‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’: The challenges of adapting Márquez

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It took a team of four writers—José Rivera, Natalia Santa, Camila Brugés and Albatros González—and script consultant Maria Camila Arias to adapt the 400-plus pages of the book into a screenplay. The cast includes Diego Vázquez, Marleyda Soto and Claudio Cataño.

One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with the iconic line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." The story begins with José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Úrsula Iguarán, who become founders of a new utopian town called Macondo. It follows generations of the Buendia family as they endure all kinds of challenges and fear confinement to one hundred years of solitude.

Camila Brugés and Natalia Santa, who are both of Colombian origin, though the former lives near Mexico City and the latter in Bogota, spoke to Lounge about the responsibility of adapting this novel to screen. Edited excerpts from a video interview:

What was the greatest challenge in taking an epic book like this and adapting it to a series?

The most difficult thing for us was the decision to transpose the true spirit of the novel. All the decisions we took as a team of writers, and also that we passed on to the whole production crew, actors, etc., was to do a very faithful adaptation of the novel in its premise, plots, characters. None of us thought it was necessary to change much from Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s genius piece of work. Another challenge was what do we leave in and what do we leave out, because we have a specific amount of time and we could have done a hundred hours of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but we had 16 hours, so we had to pick stuff, and that was difficult because in this novel Márquez is giving you sentence by sentence of amazing imagery, of profound human wisdom. So editing and selecting was very challenging.

I read that in your early discussions, you spent time talking about quantum physics and the circularity of time because you had to give it some sort of chronological order, given how timelines intersect in the book.

Yes. Both of us came on at the second stage of development. We started working on a first version from José Rivera that was the chronological setup of the events. He organised Márquez in a linear timeline. But for us, it was very important to have a conversation about how he works with time and, even if we’re telling the story in a chronological way, how could we talk about the circularity of time, the repetition of things. The loop of what happens in the family, the political loop of what happens in history, that we still feel is Colombia. So our first day of work we went into a feverish conversation about inter-dimensionality, string theory, etc. It was pretty cool.

How much did the text hold you back and how much did it push you forward?

There is something that is untranslatable, almost impossible to transpose with literary language this rich and layered. You have to leave it that way. How can you translate Márquez’s poetry, the perfect and clear idea of the character’s soul he captures in one line? What we can translate, or what we can rewrite in an audio-visual language is, most of the time, the specific events, the story of these characters, what happens to each one. So what we had to do in the audio-visual language is to create a character that has an evolution or a dramatic arc from beginning to end, which is not as defined in the original novel, while always trying to take the hints that Márquez has left us of every character in order to create new things. Throughout the focus was on being loyal to the novel.

Márquez did not want this book to be adapted to film, and definitely not out of Colombia. So when the Márquez family agreed to this adaptation, did they place some conditions on how it should be done?

Yes. They said it needed to be done in Spanish, filmed in Colombia by a Colombian team, or the majority of them at least, and they insisted that it should be done in a series format. While he was alive, Gabo (Márquez) was adamant that it should not be a film, and for very good reason. We had a hard enough job of fitting the story into a series. Series production, technological advances, streaming allow this, but unfortunately Gabo didn’t live to see it.

Udita Jhunjhunwala is a writer, film critic and festival programmer. She posts @Udita_J.

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